신자유주의 시대와 젠더무의식

Abstract

In the era of neoliberalism, the freedom of individuals is only exercised as freedom in a capitalist market. Personal freedom in this sense is not different from the free competition of the market. As the freedom of personal choice expands, responsibility for the choices is transferred entirely over to the individual. With the reduction of the power of the social sphere, it has been impossible to prevent the curtailment of the social safety net. Because people are losing their safe-havens from the vagaries of the market, uncertainty has become the chief characteristic and governing principle of people’s lives. The uncertainty of everyday life is accompanied by epistemological uncertainty. In this neoliberal era, the market itself has been determining the shape of what is sometimes thought of as “raditional gendered-roles.” Family, motherhood and the home are no longer stable spaces. The anxiety, anger and fear experienced by gendered-subjects in this age of neoliberalism construct gender/unconsciousness as the discourse of the other. Our received concepts of patriarchal ideology have lost their explanatory power on account of these changing circumstances. As the new wine must be contained in a new bottle, feminism in this neoliberal era also needs to be conceptualized in a new way. To this end, this paper suggests a new term, gender/unconsciousness. The gender/unconsciousness tries to return to the surface of consciousness at the critical moment of gender struggle. The gender/unconsciousness is manifested in diverse forms. The threatening female under the gaze of males becomes a femme fatale. The main characteristics of a femme fatale resist against the male’s desire to know what women want. In contrast, the unconscious survival strategy used among young women of the neoliberal period is “playing cute.” Superficially, cute women seem quite different from the threatening femme fatale. However, they are two sides of a coin. The purpose of this essay is to shed light on the structure of gender/unconsciousness and to analyze the so called “playing cute” (seduction, masquerade) as a survival strategy employed by women in this neoliberal period.